This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

It is the 10th Boxing Day since Dr. Ajay Sahajpal stood on Yonge St., his hands and pants drenched with the blood of a teenage girl. She would later die, despite his best efforts to save her.

Sahajpal says his memory of that day — Dec. 26, 2005 — seared his brain. He can replay it like a movie, and sometimes does, usually on Boxing Day. Because that was the day he heard gunshots for the first time; the day his decision to buy a homeless man pizza may have saved his life; when his sudden fear of death melted into his need to help, and he rushed to treat the first person he saw who had been shot on the street.

“You know,” he says, 10 years later, “for me it was just a regular Boxing Day and then all of a sudden this event happened … it’s hard to explain unless you’ve been through it.

“I was her first responder.”

Article Continued Below

The 15-year-old’s death shocked the city — and the country. She was felled by a .357 or .38 calibre bullet as she shopped with her sister on Yonge St., struck by crossfire in a gang shootout that sparked national soul-searching on guns and crime and years of court proceedings that saw two men convicted of murder and two others of manslaughter.

But mostly there was sorrow over the death of someone so young and uninvolved. To many, it was appallingly, maddeningly inexplicable.

“The fact that Jane Creba died sticks with me,” says Sahajpal, now 40 and working as a transplant surgeon at a hospital in Milwaukee. “I was present for everything.”

Shooting erupted shortly after 5 p.m. that day. Sahajpal, who lived in a condo at Bay and Gerrard Sts., was working as the chief surgical resident at St. Michael’s Hospital on Queen St. E. But Boxing Day was his day off, so he and an old friend visiting from out of town were out — like thousands of others — moseying around the downtown streets near the Eaton Centre and Dundas Square. They popped into the Pizza Pizza at the corner of Elm St. and Yonge St. for a bite.

Meanwhile, according to the well-worn narrative of the day that emerged in court testimony and news stories, Jane Creba was shopping with her older sister, Alison. They went into Sam the Record Man before Creba left her sister inside and crossed the street toward the Pizza Pizza to find a washroom.

A man stepped out of a Foot Locker onto the street. Witnesses in court said he wore a white T-shirt that read “Stop Snitching” and that he turned north to confront a group of about 10 males who were standing outside the Pizza Pizza. “Are these your boys? ’Cause these are my boys,” he was heard saying. “And I have a .357.”

The man, later identified as Jeremiah Valentine and convicted of murder, raised his arm to reveal the silver tip of a .357 Magnum, which poked out the bottom of his jacket sleeve, according to testimony from his trial. “He shot and he shot until the shots ran out,” a key Crown witness told the Star in 2010. Gunshots rang back from the group to the north.

Sahajpal was inside Pizza Pizza and moments earlier had noticed a homeless man in front of the store. He says he was about to go outside and give him some change, when his friend suggested he buy the man pizza to give him after they had eaten. Gunfire broke out just as they sat down and Sahajpal says he shoved his friend off her chair and got on top of her on the floor.

Before long, Sahajpal says, a man behind the counter called out that it was safe to get up. Sahajpal immediately went outside. The street was strangely emptied out, he says. Then he saw Creba.

“She was basically lying on the street — sort of half on the sidewalk, half on the street,” he says. “She was by herself.”

He told his friend to stay inside the Pizza Pizza and ran over to Creba. He could tell she was alive, but she wasn’t moving and she wasn’t conscious. Sahajpal said paramedics arrived very quickly to help him and they started suctioning blood out of Creba’s mouth and working to keep her heart beating. The teenager was soon lifted onto a gurney and rushed away in an ambulance.

Sahajpal, his hands and pants covered in Creba’s blood, took his friend home to his condo and then sped to St. Mike’s, where he knew Creba had been sent. Yonge St. was cordoned off with police tape, but Sahajpal was whisked to St. Mike’s in a speeding police van.

He rushed into the trauma ward, where Creba was being treated by several doctors. It quickly became clear she was dead.

Things got harder when Creba’s family arrived at St. Mike’s. Along with several others, they were frantically trying to find their loved one amid the post-shooting chaos. Sahajpal was part of the medical team that told them their 15-year-old had died.

“It was a very challenging situation,” he says.

Looking back now, Sahajpal believes he leapt to treat Creba as a way to “cope” with a frightening and confusing situation.

But inside his vivid, film-reel memory of Dec. 26, 2005, there’s also a smudge of regret.

“I still wish I could have saved her,” he says. “That sticks with me, that I couldn’t. I think of, lots of times, what I could have done differently, either at the scene or at the hospital. The whole day sticks with me. I can go through the play-by-play in my head.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com